Fatimid Caliphate

Also known as al-Khilafa al-Fatimiyya, Fatimid Egypt

Shi'a Isma'ili caliphate based in Cairo whose loss of Jerusalem to the First Crusade and slow eclipse by Saladin set the political shape of the early Latin East.

Founded in 909 in Ifriqiya by 'Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi, the Fatimid imam-caliphate moved its capital to the new city of al-Qahira (Cairo) in 969 and at its height ruled North Africa, Egypt, the Hijaz, and much of Syria-Palestine. As Isma'ili Shi'a in a Sunni-majority world, the Fatimids built a sophisticated counter-caliphate against the Abbasids of Baghdad and at the time of the First Crusade had recovered Jerusalem from the Seljuks only in August 1098 — a year before the Franks took it from them.

The eleventh and twelfth centuries were the long Fatimid decline. Real power had passed from the imam-caliph to a succession of viziers, and the dynasty's military weakness on its Syrian frontier was a precondition for the unopposed Crusader settlement of the coast. Through the 1160s rival Frankish and Zengid expeditions repeatedly invaded a tottering Egypt for control of its tax revenue.

The end came when Saladin, sent originally as a Zengid lieutenant under his uncle Shirkuh, was installed as Fatimid vizier in 1169. Two years later, on the death of the last Fatimid caliph al-Adid in September 1171, he abolished the caliphate, restored Sunni allegiance to Baghdad, and so transformed Egypt from the strategic shelter of the Crusader states into the engine of their reconquest.

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